As Microsoft made another attempt to fulfil its goal of establishing a three-horse race in the mobile market with WP8, HTC was also one of the four hardware partners mentioned. Not to be outdone by Nokia, HTC and Microsoft jointly announced two signature devices for the new mobile OS - Windows Phone 8X and 8S.

The Windows Phone 8X is the flagship device from HTC, which will go head-to-head with the Nokia Lumia 920 and Samsung ATIV S. So how does the signature WP8 device compare against the other WP8 offerings? Here's a quick look at its specs and the comparison among the three leading WP8 devices: -

Design

If there's an award for the best designed WP8 device, we would unambiguously give our vote to the WP8X by HTC. Sporting an angular chassis with contoured sides and non-slip matte polycarbonate, the WP8X by HTC is quite a distinctive phone from its peers.

Compared to the hefty Nokia Lumia 920 (185g), the Windows Phone 8X by HTC offers a better handling due to its lighter weight (130g). Besides ensuring that the device feels comfortable in the hands, the tapering sides also makes the HTC phone look slimmer than the Nokia Lumia when the difference is actually just 0.6mm.

Like many of the WP devices out there, the WP8X by HTC features the three standard touch-sensitive navigation buttons (Back, Home, Search) below its 4.3-inch Super LCD 2 display. Its front-facing camera resides on the top left of its display, which seems to us as an awkward location since most phones either have it in the center or to the right.

As great as its design is, it is very unfortunate that its Power and volume controls are not well-designed for usability. We find the buttons to be too flushed to the body of the phone, hence we have difficulty pressing them when the need arises. It is especially annoying to see this happening despite the huge amount of effort and time devoted to designing the phone and yet overlooking on this critical aspect of usability.

WP8 with a Spoonful of HTC Goodies

We've covered the major features of WP8 in two articles - Top Eight New Features and New Features Unveiled for Windows Phone 8, hence we will not go into detail on them again in this article. Instead, we will focus on what HTC has to offer through its software additions which are Beats Audio integration, HTC and Photo Enhancer.

Beats Audio

Exclusive to HTC smartphones only, Beats Audio integration is claimed to offer authentic, studio quality sound when you are listening to music, playing games or watching a video. From our previous experience with the Beats Audio optimizer feature on the HTC Sensation XE, we find the audio experience to be catered for bass-heads.

HTC

Formerly known as HTC Hub, it has been renamed as "HTC" and gives you access to weather information, stock statistics and news stories. For all three categories, you can add more countries or cities (for weather), more indices (for stocks) and more subscriptions (for news).

Photo Enhancer

While WP8 will get Instagram by the end of this year, WP8X by HTC users can make use of the company's in-house photo enhancer app to add some image filters to the photos they have taken. The Photo Enhancer app and its image filters are also found on the current One series.